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A must-have design book!

Okay, before I begin, a quick disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with this book, author, or publishing company in any way, shape or form. I simply love her design techniques.

This book, by Robin Williams, is entitled "The Non-Designers Design Book". The book covers not only paper design, but typography and font styles as well. The book conveys four main principles that I really love:

Contrast: This states that if two elements on a page are not alike, make them drastically different. For example, if you use a 16-point font for a headline and a 14 pt. font for a body paragraph, well, there's not going to be any noticable difference. It give tips on how to contrast certain things, and how to tell a contrast problem.

Repetition: In this section, she talks about how once your design is established, you have to repeat the design throughout the paper / page. This makes your site / page / document more uniform and the design integrates better.

Alignment: This is perhaps my favorite section. Shows the advantage of all forms of alignment, and simple tricks that can be done to put less strain on the user's eyes and to make the eyes go where you want them to go. Besides that, it shows you how to use your own eyes to tell you of alignment problems. Uses simple illustrations to demonstrate, such as a business card.

Proximity: Last, but certainly not least, it explains proximity. Proximity is grouping things that go together by themselves, and how to not make things muddled (uses examples such as lists and such). Put the same topics together, etc.

I won't even get into the typography section, as there's too much to cover, but in short it's a great book.

I totally concurr. I find this book maybe a little bit simplistic for me, but I recommend it to all my students who are just starting out. A lot of the stuff is common sense but you can see the lightbulb lighting above their heads when they read it.